1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an earphone and more particularly, to a touch control earphone, which can effectively save power when not in use, prolonging available time of the whole earphone.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the development of consumer electronic products, more and more electronic products use touch sensitive keys to replace traditional mechanical keys. For the application in energy-conserving and power-saving products, touch control chip manufactures all try hard to reduce the electric current consumption of the touch control chip as low as possible, and unceasingly optimize software and hardware to attain microampere (μA)-grade power consumption. That undoubtedly injects new vitality into the rapidly changing consumer electronic products.
As to the traditional earphone using the mechanical key, no matter how the mechanical key is designed, the mechanical key certainly occupies a part of space and surface area of the casing of the earphone and increases difficulty in designing the casing of the earphone. This is relatively unfavorable for the current earphone trend towards light/thin appearance design. Besides, the mechanical key still has other problems such as short life in usage, light leakage, mechanical sound interference by key actuation, and collecting dirt. Therefore, more and more earphones are designed with touch sensitive keys.
Although the earphone using the touch sensitive key is more likely to have compact components, that effectively minimize the volume of the earphone (ex. light/thin appearance), the earphone using the touch sensitive key needs constant power supply to the touch control chip of the touch control key for the maintenance of regular operation of the touch control key. Therefore, the low power consumption of the touch control chip itself constantly consumes the power of the battery in the earphone, shortening the available time of the whole earphone. Especially for the earphone having a small-capacity battery, this power consumption problem will be severer and severer. Therefore, how to effectively lower the power consumption of the earphone when it is not in use so as to prolong the available time of the whole earphone, is a critical problem the dealers of earphone designing want to figure out.